Murder most foul on the Fenchurch Street line

Murder most foul: The 1864 railway killing of Thomas Briggs sent a wave of fear throughout the country

Although you may not be able to judge a book by its cover, it can give you a pretty good idea what market its publishers are aiming for.

Take a quick look at the cover of Mr Briggs’ Hat and you could easily mistake it for Kate Summerscale’s 2008 bestseller, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Nor does the resemblance end there.

This, too, is about a Victorian murder - one that like Mr Whicher’s investigation attracted enormous public interest and was seen as the harbinger of a new, more brutal age.

In July 1864, passengers on the Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm North London Railway reported that one of the first-class compartments was saturated in blood.

Female passengers in adjoining compartments complained that their dresses had been stained by red droplets flying in through the window. The compartment, however, was empty - apart from a black leather bag, a walking stick and a hat.

A couple of hours later, a man was found lying beside the track. He was alive, but only just - he’d been savagely beaten about the head with a blunt instrument. Shortly afterwards, he died without regaining consciousness. The dead man was Thomas Briggs, the 69-year-old chief clerk at a bank in the City.

This was the first time anyone had been murdered on a British train, and Fleet Street promptly worked itself up into a tremendous apocalyptic froth. ‘If we can be murdered thus,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘we may be slain in our pew at church or assassinated at our dinner table.’

Briggs’s family identified the walking stick and the case, but were adamant the hat wasn’t his. From the start, the police suspected the murderer had mistakenly taken Briggs’s hat and left his own behind. It also transpired Briggs’s watch and watch chain had been stolen.

Two days after the murder, a jeweller with the singularly apt name of John Death claimed a watch chain identical to the one described in the papers had been exchanged in his shop that morning by a man with a foreign accent.

A week later, a hackney carriage driver identified the hat found on the train as belonging to a German tailor called Franz Muller.

Shown a photograph of Muller, John Death immediately fingered him as the man who had come into his shop. But when the police went to Muller’s lodgings, they found he’d just left for New York.

Thus began what must surely be the slowest chase scene in the annals of crime.

The first train murderer: Franz Muller, a German tailor, was hanged for the murder of Thomas Briggs

The detective and the two main witnesses - John Death and the hackney carriage driver - caught the next boat for New York. While their boat crossed the Atlantic in a mere 14 days, Muller’s took a pedalo-like six weeks.

When he was finally arrested, Muller’s suitcase was found to contain Briggs’s watch as well as his hat. This seemed to put his guilt beyond any question. Yet still doubts persisted.

Somehow Muller didn’t look the part, being physically weedy as well as mild-mannered and affable. ‘To look at him, one would think he was about the last person in the world who could deliberately plan and execute any very heinous crime,’ the New York Times reported.

But the British papers had no doubt that he was the murderer and by the time Muller’s trial started at the Old Bailey in October 1864, his wax effigy was already on show in the Chamber of Horrors. Throughout the trial, Muller insisted he was innocent.

The jury, however, took less than 15 minutes to find him guilty - although the speed of their verdict may have had something to do with the fact that Victorian juries were denied heating, food and refreshment during their deliberations.

Yet Muller wasn’t short of sympathisers, some of them in unlikely places. As he sentenced him to death, the judge pressed a large handkerchief to his face to obscure his tears.

Hanged before a crowd of 50,000 - this was one of the last public hangings to take place in Britain - Muller apparently admitted his guilt to the prison doctor moments before he died. But here again there are doubts: no one else heard him confess and in all the notes he wrote in prison, he continued to protest his innocence.

So did Muller do it? Almost certainly yes, although Colquhoun believes he may have had an accomplice who got away. And herein lies the problem with Mr Briggs’s Hat: you keep expecting some new piece of information to emerge that will turn everything on its head and give the story fresh impetus - except it never does.

None of this is Colquhoun’s fault, her account is elegantly written, lively and as dramatic as she can make it. The only thing lacking a memorable twist of drama, alas, is the case itself.

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Murder most foul on the Fenchurch Street line: MR BRIGGS' HAT: A SENSATIONAL ACCOUNT OF BRITAIN'S FIRST RAILWAY MURDER BY KATE COLQUHOUN